Read Online Make Death Love Me by Ruth Rendell - Free Book Online Page A

If you don’t want to spend the best years of your life inside, little brain.’
    Mrs Burroughs phoned her husband at his office in Stantwich and asked him if he thought it would be all right for her to put Aunt Jean’s money in the Anglian-Victoria Treasure Trove scheme. He said she was to do as she liked, it was all one to him if she hadn’t enough faith in him to let him invest it for her, and she was to do as she liked. So Mrs Burroughs got into her Scimitar at two and reached the Anglian-Victoria at five past. The doors were still shut. Having money of her own and not just being dependent on her husband’s money had made her feel quite important, a person to be reckoned with, and she was annoyed. She banged on the doors, but no one came and it was too wet to stand out there. She sat in the Scimitar for five minutes and when the doors still didn’t open she got out again and looked through the window. The window was frosted, but on this, in clear glass, was the emblem of the Anglian-Victoria, an A and a V with vine leaves entwining them and a crown on top. Mrs Burroughs looked through one of the arms of the V and saw the tills emptied and thrown on the floor. She drove off as fast as she could to the police house two hundred yards down the village street, feeling very excited and enjoying herself enormously.
    By this time the red Vauxhall had passed through Childon on its way to Stantwich. Its driver was a young man called Peter Johns who was taking his mother to visit her sister in Stantwich General Hospital. They met a police car with its blue lamp on and its siren blaring, indeed they came closer to colliding with it than they had done with the mini-van, and these two near-misses afforded them a subject for conversation all the way to the hospital.
    At ten to three the police called on Mrs Elizabeth Culver to tell her the bank had been robbed and her daughter was missing. Mrs Culver said it was kind of them to come and tell her so promptly, and they said they would fetch her husband who was a factory foreman on the Stantwich industrial estate. She went upstairs and put back into her wardrobe the dress she had been going to wear that evening, and then she phoned the Toll House Hotel to tell them to cancel the arrangements for the silver wedding party. She meant to phone her sisters too and her brother and the woman who, twenty-five years before, had been her bridesmaid, but she found she was unable to do this. Her husband came in half an hour later and found her sitting on the bed, staring silently at the wardrobe, tears streaming down her face.
    Pamela Groombridge was ironing Alan’s shirts and intermittently discussing with her father why the phone hadn’t been answered when she rang the bank at twenty to two and two o’clock and again at three. In between discussing this she was thinking about an article she had read telling you how to put coloured transfers on ceramic tiles.
    Wilfred Summitt was drinking tea. He said that he expected Alan had been out for his dinner.
    â€˜He never goes out,’ said Pam. ‘You know that, you were sitting here when I was cutting his sandwiches. Anyway, that girl would be there, that Joyce.’
    â€˜The phone’s gone phut,’ said Pop. ‘That’s what it is, the phone’s out of order. It’s on account of the lines being overloaded. If I had my way, only responsible ratepayers over thirty’d be allowed to have phones.’
    â€˜I don’t know. I think it’s funny. I’ll wait till half-past and then I’ll try it again.’
    Pop said to mark his words, the phone was out of order, gone phut, kaput, which wouldn’t happen if the army took over, and what was wanted was Winston Churchill to come back to life and Field Marshal Montgomery to help him, good old Monty, under the Queen of course, under Her Majesty. Or it just could be the rain, coming down cats and dogs it was, coming down like